american studies on two wheels

109: Tim Cresswell’s Place

Tim Cresswell’s Place: A Short Introduction is a lovely lit review of cultural geography debates on the concept of place. While Cresswell is clear and thoughtful about each of the geographers he discusses, his own definition of place is as a “meaningful location,” which he likes because it is both subjective and objective, both physical and cultural. In addition, his research focuses on social difference and place, what it means to transgress a place, and what it means to be out of place – “anachorism.”

The three levels of place:

Descriptive; visual; surfaces

Social construction; practice; social difference

Phenomenological; essential; humanist; universal

At one point or another, cultural geography has embraced one or more of these levels.

Debates/ paradigms in cultural geography, in chronological order:

Regional geography (Sauer, Hartshorne);

Humanistic Geography (Tuan, Relph; universals);

Place as home (Heidegger’s dwelling; feminist critiques);

Radical Human Geography and the Politics of Place (Marxist critique of essentialism; Harvey; Cresswell);

Place as Being-in-the-World vs Place as Social Construct (whether place has a physical component?);

Place, Practice and Process (bodily mobility; place-ballets; return to essentialism; structuration theory and place as becoming; Thrift and non-representational theory; Soja; de Certeau; place as event, openness, change);

How redistricting requires creating new histories and new meanings for new regions

In Place/ Out of Place, or anachorism (Cresswell’s jam): place and what’s appropriate; Cresswell uses gay communities, refugees, and homeless people as folks who use place in ways they’re not intended, including queering space through performance, and using the homeless, refugees, and other deviant users of space as a constitutive outside that constructs and reinforces normative ideas of place